CHAPTER 14
Elena
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The suite is quieter than the storm was. I follow raindrops as I counted them last night at the window — one, two, three, four — and the count is slower now, because the rain has been hammered down to a drag along the building's face.
I touch the medallion at my sternum. Saint Raphael under my finger pad, the hairline crack across the angel's wing. Twice today already. A third touch before I go would be a tell, and I keep my hand on my hip instead.
I use the room instead. Seconds between my last breath and the next — three, four, six because I make myself slow. The cardigan is on me. Unripe-wheat cashmere. Stefan's.
At twenty-two-fifteen I take the cardigan off, fold it, lay it on the writing desk over the drawer that holds the small enameled pediatric pin. The cardigan stays on top because I want to put it on after.
After is the word I am practicing.
I walk the corridor toward the freight elevator and count the doors as I pass them — four — and the lights in the ceiling — six between the suite and the lift. The count is the floor.
The trauma bay corridor is empty at twenty-two-thirty on a Sunday night.
The Halloween case-board is half-written; the chopper pad is silent.
Bay 6 is to my left. The leaking O2 regulator at the rack — the one Beatriz mutters about and the maintenance log keeps not noticing — hisses below my hearing.
Alexei is in the corridor outside Bay 6 in his black scrubs and the white coat he never buttons. The knurled steel ring on his right thumb has turned once since I came around the corner. He has been waiting.
"Krasivaya."
"Alexei."
He waits for me to move first. That is the structure. I move. He opens the bay door. The light spills out of it onto my left shoe. The light is the second thing I notice. The first is Gabriel.
Gabriel is at the far end of the bay's doorway in his charcoal trousers and his oxblood roll-neck, his black hair tied back.
He has held that exact position since I came in.
He will hold it. His left hand is at his jaw, the four fingers pressed lightly under the bone, the thumb at the line where his beard would be if he grew one. He is the architecture of the doorway.
The light behind him from the corridor falls past his shoulder and lays itself on the bay's floor in a long pale rectangle that ends where the cot begins.
I stop one step inside the door. Alexei closes it.
The empty bay — the gurney pushed against the east wall, the steel instrument cart, the overhead light he has dimmed to half.
The cot at the bay's center is the after-hours cot, the trauma surgeon's cot, the one Alexei sleeps on between bad nights.
Steel-framed and narrow. Bolted to the floor.
I touch it with the back of my left hand. The steel is cold. I test the bolts — four — and I follow Alexei's breath at my shoulder — the four-beat I learned from Stefan, the four-beat my body has begun to keep without asking.
"Color, doctor."
"Green."
Six days have passed since he last called me doctor. The word is a courtesy. The word is also him telling me the structure is the structure: he is asking; I am answering; what comes next is mine to keep or to put down.
"Up."
I sit on the cot. The frame creaks under me — the cold steel taking my weight. Alexei kneels at my feet and undoes my shoes one at a time, laces unhurried, the worn Hokas folded into a square as he folds a tarp at the garage. He sets them under the cot.
Gabriel holds his post. The doorway light on his shoulder; the doorway light on the cot's foot.
"Top off."
I pull the scrub top over my head. I keep the medallion at my sternum. The chain catches the half-light and lays itself in the hollow of my throat where it belongs.
"Pants."
I lift my hips. He pulls the scrub bottoms down and off, folds them, sets them on the gurney across the bay because the floor is the floor and he is a surgeon. The cotton briefs go the same way. The cot is cold along the back of my thighs.
"Lie back."
I lie back. The pillow is one of Alexei's, the one he uses on the bad nights — the cotton smells faintly of him, the scrub-soap and the under-skin smoke he is supposed to have quit. My arms go to my sides because he has not yet told me where to put them.
Alexei stands at the foot of the cot. His belt comes off in one motion — workmanlike, a man taking a belt off because he is going to use it — and the brushed-steel buckle catches the doorway light.
He coils the leather in his left hand the way trauma men coil a tourniquet — neat, taut, with the loop already begun for the wrist.
"Wrists at the small of your back, krasivaya. Roll. Onto your side first. There. Now lie back over them. I have you."
I roll. The cot frame is cold under my left shoulder and then under my right shoulder as I come back.
I tuck my wrists under me at the small of my back, palms up, as he showed me without saying.
He wraps the belt around them — the leather warmed by his hip, soft against the bone of my wrist, the buckle on top so the brushed metal stays clear of the small bones.
He cinches it. The loop is firm. The belt sits snug — held, room to breathe.
"Pull."
I pull. My hands stay where he set them. The cot frame creaks under the shift of my hips.
"There. Tell me green or yellow."
"Green."
He takes my ankles. He puts them on his shoulders — the right first, the left after — and the cot frame rings once under my hips as my weight settles back onto my own bound wrists.
The cold steel along the small of my back is a third thing my body files: the cot frame at my wrists, at my thighs, at the bones of my hips.
I follow Alexei's breath again — one, two, three, four — and I follow Gabriel's silence from the doorway because Gabriel breathes too quiet to count any other way: one silence, two silences, three.
Alexei is between my thighs, still in his scrub bottoms. The knurled steel ring is on his right thumb and he has set the thumb at my left hip bone because that is where he always sets it before he goes in — the ring on bone, the same after-image he left on my sternum in this same bay sixteen days ago.
"I am going to put my mouth on you first, krasivaya. Color."
"Green."
He bends. His stubble is on the inside of my thigh first, the burn of two-day growth dragging up toward where I am already wet from my walk into the bay.
His tongue finds my clit and goes flat against it once, slow, learning the geography.
I lift. The belt at my wrists pulls; my hips lift against his mouth instead of my hands; the cot frame creaks again and the steel along my back is the cold that holds me to the room.
Gabriel stays at the edge of my peripheral, kept there. I take inventory.
One — Alexei's tongue around my clit, the wide flat first pass.
Two — the pressure of his ringed thumb at my hip, the steel that says here, here, here.
Three — his stubble against the inside of my thigh, the burn that is its own pulse.
Four — my own breath catching at the root of my tongue.
He sucks at my clit and the count breaks; I gasp; the cot frame's steel along my back grounds me before the gasp finishes; I am here.
"Such a fucking gift," he says, low, mouth still on me. The line lands inside my hips before it lands at my ear. "Look at you. You walked in here for this. Krasivaya. Fuck."
I look at him. His head between my thighs in the white half-light.
The smoke-gray eyes lifted to mine. He goes back to my clit with the flat of his tongue, then with the tip, then with the suck that finds the rhythm I keep when I am alone, and the count goes — one, two, three — and I am coming on his mouth before I can finish the four.
I come quietly. I have always come quietly.
I bite down on the inside of my left cheek and the sound that comes out is one breath and one half-syllable that is the start of his name.
The belt at my wrists holds my hands away from his hair.
The cot frame under my hips rings once with the shift of my weight as I come down.
"There you are. There she is. Krasivaya. Breathe."
I breathe.
Now I look at Gabriel.
He has held his ground. His left hand is still under his jaw.
The doorway light is still long on his shoulder.
His face is the face he wears when he is watching a procedure he taught me to assist on — open, patient, present, the four-second pause inside every blink.
He is the scene. He is the wall the scene is being built against. He sees that I have looked at him. He holds his stillness whole.
I listen to his silences. One. Two. Three. The third silence is the one that makes me know what I want.
Alexei lifts my left ankle and sets it back on his shoulder and the cot frame creaks again.
"Color."
"Green."
He pushes his scrub bottoms down and kicks them off.
He stands between my thighs naked from the waist down and takes his cock in his left hand because his left is the dominant hand.
He guides himself to me. He runs the head of his cock through the slick of me, then up to my clit, then back down — once, twice, the wet sound of it audible in the room over the small ongoing hiss of the regulator down the corridor.
He pushes the head of his cock into me. He stops. He waits.
"Color, krasivaya."
"Green."
He takes me. Steady. The Alexei tempo, the trauma tempo, the bleeding-time tempo — the pace of a man who measures everything in how long he has — and I take him with a sound at the hollow of my mouth that has no word inside it.
The cot frame rings under the shift of my weight as he fills me.
The belt at my wrists pulls; the steel along my back grounds me.
He fucks me in long deliberate strokes that bottom out at the back of me and pull almost all the way out and bottom out again. His eyes stay open. They always stay open.
"Look at me."
I look at him.
"Krasivaya. Look at how you take it. There — there — fuck."